Participial Perception Verb Complements in Old English

Verb Learning in 14- and 18-Month-Old English- Learning Infants

The present study investigates English-learning infants’ early understanding of the link between the grammatical category verb and the conceptual category event, and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled Habituation-Switch Paradigm. In Experiment 1, we habituated 14and 18month-old infants wi...

Verb Acquisition in English and Japanese

Three decades ago, Carol Chomsky (1969) reported finding surprising differences between child and adult uses of the verbs ask, tell, look and see. A later study by Deidre Gentner (1978) showed that children often confuse the verbs mix and stir. Melissa Bowerman (1978) reported that her daughters overextended words in unusual ways, including the verbs kick and open. Despite these early observati...

Serial Verb Constructions in English and Chinese

Traditionally, the term serial verb construction refers to a sequence of verbs or verb phrases in a sentence in which there is no intervening conjunction. The English expression go eat, for example, might be considered as a kind of serial verb construction since there is no infinitive or other morphosyntactic marker present to indicate a coordinating or subordinating relationship between the tw...

English verb regularization in books and tweets

The English language has evolved dramatically throughout its lifespan, to the extent that a modern speaker of Old English would be incomprehensible without translation. One concrete indicator of this process is the movement from irregular to regular (-ed) forms for the past tense of verbs. In this study we quantify the extent of verb regularization using two vastly disparate datasets: (1) Six y...

EFL learners' learning of English verb argument structure